Special Circumstances

Deep Time

From The Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, ISBN: 0679451145), I quote footnote number 75 in its entirety:

The Copernican revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its revelation of the immensity of space, dealt a profound blow to man's sense of being at the center of the universe; this was voiced by no one more poignantly than Pascal: "The whole visible world is but an imperceptible speck," he lamented; man was now "lost in this remote corner of Nature," closed into "the tiny cell where he lodges." And Kepler spoke of a "hidden and secret horror," a sense of being "lost" in the infinity of space.

The eighteenth century, with its close attention to rocks and fossils and geologic processes, was to radically alter man's sense of time as well (as Rossi, Gould and McPhee, in particular, have emphasized). Evolutionary time, geologic time, deep time, was not a concept which came naturally or easily to the human mind, and once conceived, aroused fear and resistance.

There was great comfort in the feeling that the earth was made for man and its history coeval with his, that the past was to be measured on a human scale, no more than few score of generations back to the first man, Adam. But now the biblical chronology of the earth was vastly extended, into a period of eons. Thus while Archbishop Ussher had calculated that the world was created in 4004 B.C., when Buffon introduced his secular view of nature -- with man appearing only in the latest of seven epochs -- he suggested an unprecedented age of 75,000 years for the earth. Privately, he increased this time scale by forty -- the original figure in his manuscripts was three million years -- and he did this (as Rossi notes) because he felt that the larger figure would be incomprehensible to his contemporaries, would give them too fearful a sense of the "dark abyss" of time. Less than fifty years later, Playfair was to write of how, gazing at an ancient geologic unconformity, "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time."

When Kant, in 1755, published his Theory of the Heavens, his vision of evolving and emerging nebulae, he envisaged that "millions of years and centuries" had been required to arrive at the present state, and saw creation as being eternal and immanent. With this, in Buffon's words, "the hand of God" was eliminated from cosmology, and the age of he universe enormously extended. "Men in Hooke's time had a past of six thousand years," as Rossi writes, but "those of Kant's times were conscious of a past of millions of years."

Yet Kant's millions were still very theoretical, not yet firmly grounded in geology, in any concrete knowledge of the earth. The sense of a vast geologic time filled with terrestial events, was not to come until the next century, when Lyell, in his Principles of Geology, was able to bring into one's vision both the immensity and the slowness of geologic change, forcing into consciousness a sense of older and older strata stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

Lyell's first volume was published in 1830, and Darwin took it with him on the Beagle. Lyell's vision of deep time was a prerequisite for Darwin's vision too, for the almost glacially slow processes of evolution from the animals of the Cambrian to the present day required, Darwin estimated, at least 300 million years.

Stephen Jay Gould, writing about our concepts of time in Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, starts by quoting Freud's famous statement about mankind having had to endure from science "two great outrages upon its naive self-love" -- the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. To these, Freud added ("in one of history's least modest pronouncements," as Gould puts it) his own revolution, the Freudian one. But he omits from his list, Gould observes, one of the greatest steps, the discovery of deep time, the needed link between the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. Gould speaks of our difficulty even now in "biting the fourth Freudian bullet," having any real, organic sense (beneath the conceptual or metaphorical one) of the reality of deep time. And yet this revolution, he feels, may have been the deepest of them all.

It is deep time that makes possible the blind movement of evolution, the massing and honing of minute effects over eons. It is deep time that opens a new view of nature, which if it lacks the Divine fiat, the miraculous and providential, is no less sublime in its own way. "There is grandeur in this view of life," wrote Darwin, in the famous final sentence of the Origin, that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Marie Stopes

From The Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, ISBN: 0679451145), I quote footnote number 74 in its entirety:

Marie Stopes was born in London in 1880, showed insatiable curiosity and scientific gifts as an adolescent and despite strong disapprobation (similar to that which delayed the entry of women into medicine at the time) was able to enter University College, where she obtained a Gold Medal and a first-class degree in botany. Her passion for paleobotany was already developing by this time, and after graduating she went to the Botanical Institute in Munich, where she was the only woman among five hundred students. Her research on cycad ovules earned her a Ph.D. in botany, the first ever given a woman.

In 1905 she received her doctorate in science from London University, making her the youngest D.Sc. in the country. The following year, while working on a massive two-volume Cretaceous Flora for the British Museum, she also published The Study of Plant Life for Young People, a delightful book which showed her literary power and her insight into youthful imaginations, no less than her botanical expertise. She continued to publish many scientific papers, and in 1910 another popular book, Ancient Plants. Other writings, romantic novels and poems, were also stirring in her at this time, and in A Journal from Japan she gave poignant fictional form her own painfully frustrated love for an eminent Japanese botanist.

By this time other interests were competing with botany. Stopes wrote a letter to The Times supporting women's suffrage, and became increasingly conscious of how much sexually, as well as politically and professionally, women needed to be liberated. From 1914 on, though there was an overlap with paleobotany for a few years, Stopes's work dealt essentially with human love and sexuality. She was the first to write about sexual intercourse in a matter-of-fact way, doing so with the same lucidity and accuracy she had in her description of the fertilization of cycad ovules -- but also with a tenderness which was like a foretaste of D.H. Lawrence. Her books Married Love (1918), A Letter to Working Mothers (1919), and Radiant Motherhood (1920) were immensely popular at the time; no one else spoke with quite her accent or authority.

Later Stopes met Margaret Sanger, the great American pioneer of birth control, and she became its chief advocate in England. Contraception, Its Theory, History and Practice was published in 1923, and this led to the setting up of Marie Stopes clinics in London and elsewhere. Her voice, her message, had little appeal after the Second World War, and her name, once instantly recognized by all, faded into virtual oblivion. And yet, even in her old age, her paleobotanical interests never deserted her; coal balls, she often said, were really her first love.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

A book that has drawn several references to "The Name of the Rose" and "The Alienist" in its reviews. It has a similar ambition of exposing a period of history through a murder mystery. The particular setting of this novel is a period of great turmoil in England, a time of Civil War, from 1625 to 1688.

Perhaps the boldest stroke of this novel is the cast of characters which includes people like Robert Boyle, the `father' of chemistry, Thomas Ken, lecturer of logic and mathematics, John Locke, the great philosopher, Richard Lower, the most famous physician in London at the time, John Thurloe, secretary to Cromwell and spymaster, John Wallis, noted mathematician and cryptographer, Anthony Wood, historian of that period and Christopher Wren, astronomer and architect (famous for St. Paul's Cathedral).

The murder is that of Robert Grove, don in Oxford University. In what appears to be a cover-up, his servant girl Sarah Blundy is arrested. She confesses to the crime and is sentenced to be hanged. Unlikely as it may seem, Sarah is linked deeply to various political powers that operate under the surface in the England of the 17th century and her conviction for the murder of Robert Grove is only the start of a convoluted process behind the truth of the murder, which unfortunately for a book which is a murder mystery remains mostly beside the point for the author.

The novel is split up into four parts. Each is narrated by a different observer. The "Rashomon" series of accounts, while not novel, is certainly executed with great skill by Iain Pears. However, the mystery and the history explored in this novel cannot sustain four long narratives and its immense length. The first narrative by the Italian, da Cola, and the fourth and final one by Anthony Wood, are extremely compelling. However, the two narratives in the middle while carrying some relevant information could have been compressed substantially without affecting the book. As it stands, you might not get to the interesting last part of the novel due to its obese middle.

I'd like to thank R. Hwa for recommending this novel, and letting me "borrow" it.

%T An Instance of the Fingerpost
%A Iain Pears
%I Riverhead Books
%P 692
%D 1998
%G ISBN: 1573220825
%K crime-fiction

Review written: 2002/09/12

Invisible Cities (Le Città invisibili) by Italo Calvino

``From now on, I'll describe the cities to you,'' the Khan had said, ``in your journeys you will see if they exist.''

But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor.

``And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,'' Kublai said. ``It contains everything, corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm. I need only forsee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.''

``I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,'' Marco answered. ``It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.''

Such a novel is, by definition, a thought experiment. Several of them, in fact, encapsulated in one short novel. Clearly those who look up to the abstractions of Jorge Luis Borges, have to read this. Written in a similarly concise style, each chapter is either a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan who is trying to understand the nuances of his empire through his counselor, or the story of a city in some possible world.

While many of them seem arbitrary constructions, each one has at least one central idea that is being exposed, sometimes the idea is metaphorical, sometimes not, and sometimes it is not entirely original but derived from other sources. At the end, one wishes that there were more invisible cities to be discussed.

%T Invisible Cities
%T :translation of Le Città invisibili
%A Italo Calvino
%I Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
%P 165
%D 1972
%G ISBN: 0156453800
%K fiction

Review written: 2002/08/12

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

What was the core G-7 concept? Seven trashy girls, from seven famous powerful nations, singing stupid popular music, doomed to rapidly vanish.

Leggy Starlitz, a protagonist from many Sterling short stories, gets a full-length novel. Based on a bet, Starlitz has started a band called the G-7 which is set to storm the Third World, starting in Turkey, with a massive merchandising campaign centered around a phony all-girl band.

The novel while categorized as science fiction due to Sterling's previous output can be more easily described as Sterling attempting his own brand of magic realism. The result is a mixed bag. Some of the detailed multicultural research about the differences between the richer countries already deeply submerged in a marketing deluge and the emerging markets of Turkey and Eastern Europe do pay off. The attempt or even the idea of trying to capture the 20th century in various metaphors, especially when based almost exclusively on the latter half of the century, is doomed to failure.

A sometimes enjoyable read for those who like Sterling's style, which when focused on current events, as in this book, often reads like a Tom Friedman column from the New York Times.

Although the hokey use of literary criticism gets tiring really quick, the often prescient comments about friction between contemporary world cultures and its future direction is what makes some interesting reading. Bruce Sterling should get more credit for being spot on about the role of Third World terrorism in the 21st century.

%T Zeitgeist
%A Bruce Sterling
%I Bantam Books
%P 280
%D 2000
%G ISBN: 0553576410
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2002/08/09